Private, Killed 70 Years Ago in the Pacific, Is Laid to Rest

Joe Tussey received the flag that was on the coffin of his uncle Pfc. Randolph Allen. Private Allen was killed in the Battle of Tarawa during World War II.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

By David S. Joachim

July 29, 2014

ARLINGTON, Va. — Pfc. Randolph Allen of Rush, Ky., 19 years old, was among the more than 1,000 Marines who were killed during three days of intense fighting to capture the tiny island of Betio from the Japanese during World War II.

For seven decades, his body lay undiscovered along with about 500 of his fellow Marines and thousands of Japanese fighters who died in the Battle of Tarawa in 1943, their remains scattered across an overpopulated and impoverished dot in the Pacific.

But last fall, Private Allen’s remains were unearthed and identified, and on Tuesday he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors — including a colors team, a coffin team, a bugler and a firing party — as family members looked on.

Private Allen’s nephew, Joe Tussey, received the burial flag, folded into the traditional tricorn shape. As it was placed in his lap, he took off his dark glasses and wiped his eyes.

Image

Private Allen was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, including a colors team and a firing party.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

“Joe’s mother kept a picture of Randolph Allen on her fireplace on the mantle for her entire life,” said Mark Noah, an airline pilot and the founder of History Flight, the group that recovered Private Allen’s remains. “That was an unanswered question in their family history that they always wanted answered.”

Every year, the military identifies the remains of 60 to 80 service members who died in the last century’s wars. In all, 84,000 Americans are still missing — including 74,000 from World War II — but the remains of only about 35,000 of them are considered recoverable because they died on land.

With the war intensifying in the Pacific, there was no time to evacuate the fallen from Betio Island, part of the Tarawa atoll. So they were buried hastily in shallow communal graves near the shore before military crews razed the island to create airfields and prepare for the next battle, for the Marshall Islands, as the Allies advanced toward Japan. As a result, today’s islanders often come across bones and leftover munitions.

Identifying the missing frequently relies on circumstantial evidence to identify remains — what they were wearing, what they were carrying, their height and weight, and with any luck, dog tags.

Mr. Noah’s team was just so lucky, uncovering Private Allen’s dog tags and then his teeth, which provided the basis for a physical confirmation. The team also found metal objects of American origin, including a belt buckle and a pendant, mingled with the skeletons of four Japanese fighters, according to the team’s report.

Image

Private AllenCreditNational Archives

Three of the fighters appeared to have been scorched by flamethrowers.

In trying to explain how families can experience “multigenerational trauma” many decades after a loss, Lt. Col. Melinda Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, quoted a family member of another service member whose remains were recently recovered: “You don’t appreciate how important having a funeral is until you don’t have one. And you don’t appreciate having a place to visit until there is no place to visit and pay your respects to them.”

The Defense Department spends just a tiny fraction of its half-trillion-dollar budget on the recovery of missing service members, so it has increasingly relied on private groups like History Flight to send teams of excavators to the sites of historic battles.

Despite some early turf disputes, the Defense Department and History Flight now describe their efforts as a partnership. Private Allen’s remains were recovered by History Flight and were identified by the military using DNA samples.

But Mr. Noah, who says he has paid most of History Flight’s expenses, said that he recently applied for money from the Defense Department, citing a law that allows for reimbursements to groups that recover remains. He said his request was not approved.

A Defense Department spokeswoman, Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, said in a written statement, “We do not have the legal authority or any current policy that would allow for reimbursement without partnership agreements in place prior to the work being accomplished.”

For the missing of World War II, time is running out. Search teams often rely on witness accounts and try to link personal effects to individuals by interviewing people who knew them. And so, as members of the World War II generation die off, those clues are dying with them.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Private, Killed 70 Years Ago in the Pacific, Is Laid to Rest. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe